International press attention for the Agta
For years, Leiden anthropologists are doing fieldwork among the Agta, a hunter-gatherer group of the Northern Philippines. A new government road, which will cut through the Sierra Madre, recently attracted international press attention.
The Agta are a hunter-gatherer group of the Northern Philippines, located in the jungle of the Sierra Madre. Many Agta live in self-made huts of branches and dried leaves, diving for octopus and lobster, spearing reef fish, trapping wild boar and hunting deer. But all that may change. The Philippine government is building a road that will cut a path of more than 50 miles through the Sierra Madre.
Reneé Hagen, a former lecturer at Leiden University and now a PhD candidate at the University of California, has conducted repeatedly fieldwork among the Agta. For an article by the New York Times, she was interviewed about the Agta's resilience on government decisions.
Reneé Hagen, Tessa Minter and Merlijn van Weerd are currently working on an article on the displacement related to the road and tourism development of the Agta in the Sierra Madre.